FIC: What Might Have Been Lost (1/1)
Title: What Might Have Been Lost (1/1)
Author: nomad1328
Rating: T
Words: 6000ish
Warnings: Spoilers through the end of Season 4 and Major Character Death
Summary: He hates failure. But this failure is the pinnacle; this failure costs him more than any other.
Disclaimer: House is property of all those people in LA. Just borrowing for a bit and not making any $$ whatsoever off of this.
A/N: This fic (most of it) has been sitting around for almost a year. After the finale, I decided it was a goner. But then it turned into a post-finale fic. Thanks go to
joe_pike_junior for bowing to my whims and offering up beta skills.
Someday my pain, someday my pain
Will mark you
Harness your blame, harness your blame
And walk through
With the wild wolves around you
In the morning, I'll call you
Send it farther on
-The Wolves (Act I and II), Bon Iver
Death is one of a hundred certainties in life, but only spoken of indirectly, or in the quiet dark privacy of home. Always present in the deepest darkest fears, from the rise of childhood consciousness to middle age, to the elder years, the inevitable consequence of conception is nothing tangible or real for the majority. Poets lament, lovers anguish over the possibility, but the average worker bee moves forward, selectively ignorant of their own impending doom. Only the practical plan for death after the day is done, in closed, windowless offices with mahogany and lawyers and gold lettered pens. Afterall, no one actually thinks they're going to live forever. No one wants to do that. Eventually, after the glory of twenty plus years, gold watches, retirement parties, RV trips, there will be an incident, a disease, a downfall that provides a careful reminder that it's coming. After the prime of life comes the pain, the suffering, the incessant devastating loss of everything gained. From the first cry, that remarkable step, a babble to a sentence, college, family, Happily Ever After and ‘Til Death Do Us Part, and all the suffering and monotony and the occasional blips of earth-shattering joy that goes with it. There are gray hairs, arthritic joints, disease, funeral after funeral, loneliness, dementia, death. He knows it comes. It’s never pleasant. Never the release everyone thinks it will be. There is always something unfinished. If there is a goal besides the attainment of knowledge, it is the prevention of this end for as long as possible.
House is ten when he attends his first funeral. His aunt Martha. Maybe a great aunt. He doesn't remember. He does, however, remember grabbing his mother's sleeve when she put a hand to her mouth near the telephone receiver. Her eyes glassy, but not quite spilling, she takes his hand, squeezes, tells him that Martha is in heaven now. He isn't even sure who Martha is, but he's smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Two days later, they pile into his Dad's Plymouth at four in the morning and drive six hours to New York. He has to wear a suit at the church and despite his dad's protests, his mom lets him keep his pyjamas on and then change in the car when they get there. The drive is long and he sleeps most of it, but he's still tired when they arrive and he doesn't want to go inside. His youthful curiosity, however, gets the best of him. He peers over the edge of the coffin, wondering if he should touch her face. Plastic. It looks plastic, fake. Too red lipstick, rouged cheeks, white face. And he wonders if they didn’t make a model of Aunt Martha so that people could see what she looked like when she was alive. That maybe she's already decaying- putrid black and green and maggots from her nose. Like that dead rabbit he’d found on the side of the road. He asks his older cousin, Jacob. Jacob hits him hard on the arm, says “Shut up, Greg” and goes on crying with his hands in fists on his knees. House rubs his arm and continues watching the spectacle.
Over the course of his childhood, his aspirations change by the hour. A pilot at noon, an archaeologist by three, a truck driver at dinner. At fifteen, he decides once and for all that he's going to be a doctor. It's an early age and his teachers nod and shake their heads and one says "That's good, Greg. But you know that's an awful lot of school, right?" At fifteen, he's not doing great in the public schools his parents send him to. He bounces from military base schools to local schools, but can't find a niche. His teachers label him with some type of learning disorder and give him the lower level texts and classes where he's bored in seconds. He never studies from those books. He has his own, rented from libraries or bought at the thrift store with his allowance. He sleeps through class and reads all night with a flashlight under the covers. After he declares his future profession, he gets an after school job as a nurse’s assistant at the base hospital, with the help from his science teacher. She figures it's the least she can do to help the boy. The sooner he realizes it, the better. It's a dirty job that House hates, but he learns a lot and he sees a lot more death along the way. Babies suffocating in their sleep for no reason, teenage car crash victims, middle-aged cancer deaths, and the strokes and heart attacks of the elder years. All different ages, all different ways. Some die screaming. Others sigh and clench. There are lonely quiet deaths, deaths in rooms of crowded people with teary faces, deaths with a preacher holding a hand. It always sucks. Always. No one wants to live forever. But no one wants to die either. He works there until he aces his admittance exams to Johns Hopkins pre-med program and gains a lofty scholarship to go with it, astounding his parents and teachers alike. They didn't even know he was taking them.
His college and med school years are a blur of existence and estrangement from everything he has known before. There is knowledge and class and books and drugs and sex and life has never seemed so worth living. Death is employment for him, but the strangers he treats never remind him of his own mortality until it hits a little closer. Geri Weathers says she doesn't want to die. House isn’t yet as cynical as he will become, but he figures her for a brave little liar. She's twenty-eight, hardly ready- but no one is ever ready for this. Once he figures out the cause, Geri only has a week maybe, two if she's lucky and can win a battle against the pain. By the end of the third day, House is prescribing enough pain medication to knock out an elephant, but Geri keeps up her façade. In between bouts of sleep pushed by the Fentanyl patches and steady flow of morphine, she walks the halls with her husband. One step at a time. If it was him, he decides, he'd end it sooner rather than allow it to come later.
House was a year ahead of Mark Weathers in med school. And Mark never gives up on anything, but he gives up on Geri pretty quickly- even if he doesn’t say so. When Mark first comes to him, House isn't even sure Geri is really sick. He learns soon enough. Within a week, she's admitted to the hospital where they all work and she has a death sentence hanging over her head. Mark shows up everyday, kisses his wife, sleeps in a bed wheeled into the room on the days when he doesn’t work. On the seventh day, he pulls his old mentor aside and says he can't take it. He'd come to House before, back in the first weeks of school and said the same thing about Dr. Olafson's demanding course in Molecules and Cells. That class, Friday nights at the Brass Monkey, and Geri's friend Vanessa taught House that Mark never knows exactly what he wants. Pain dictates otherwise. Mark knows now. He wants House to do something. He says Geri wants it too. She is in so much pain. House is thirty years old. On the chart, it looks like a normal dose.
Society has overcome its reluctance to talk about sex, drugs, and psychiatric illness, but death is still taboo. No one dares utter the word: “She’s dying.” The phrase turns into something like: “She won’t be with us much longer.” As if she would be with someone else instead. There are quiet prayers in quiet sanctuaries, potluck dinners to help in times of need, preoccupations for the children who just can't understand and the adults who prefer not to. Practitioners avoid muttering the word altogether and tell us what procedures they can avoid, what can be done- but never offer how long she’ll be in that bed because she’s not getting out of it. House finds himself bowing to the whims of the dying because he can't stand not to. It's their choice. Patients come to doctors when they want help. When they grow tired of help, they should have the right to end their suffering sooner rather than later. Part of his job is to ease the suffering, so he does it and after a while, the guilt turns to duty.
He doesn’t attend another funeral until he’s almost forty and Stacy’s mother dies unexpectedly on a frozen mid January day. It comes as something of a surprise, though she wasn't young and wasn't in the best of health. House dreads the whole process. All the useless mumbo jumbo that goes with being dead. He knows it happens because everyone else has talked about it. It isn’t that no one has died, it’s just that House is a busy man. He works. Death is a right of passage for the person that dies and everyone who needs that closure. House's closure comes at every living moment. He doesn't need it after death. This time, however, House does his duty and holds Stacy, buries her face into his chest, and lets her cry. He doesn't need to say anything. But the funeral is another matter. He almost resists going completely, but Stacy needs him there. He keeps his mouth shut, but his mind won’t stop. Stacy handles well-meaning sympathizers, smiling with red eyes and tearstains, hands gripping onto other hands. House stands by and listens. It was a beautiful service, what she wanted, she’s looking down on all of us now. Your mom was a wonderful person. It was a normal service. She practically had the whole thing planned in her will. She doesn’t exist anymore- just a rotting corpse. And Naomi Price wasn’t that great of a person. Annoying and self-righteous, in fact, and she'd never approved of House. Didn't even pretend. None of it is about closure or celebration of a life completed or even putting the dead to rest. It’s a gathering of people who would feel guilty if they weren’t there because someone told them long ago that it was appropriate and good. On the drive home, House tells Stacy that he doesn’t want a funeral at all. He just wants a huge mural of his face painted on the exterior of the hospital. Stacy doesn’t have to tell him to shut up.
Just six months later, his face (along with an artistic rendition of his mangled thigh) is plastered on a few articles detailing a gross medical error that nearly cost him his life. He’s in so much pain that the moment his heart stops is an absolute reprieve and he dreams his life as it could be- a healthy life where doctors don't make mistakes, diseases never outpace doctors' methods, and his leg doesn't hurt- but none of them come to fruition. It isn’t a vision. Three weeks later, he's lying nearly immobile on the couch and he realizes that the cost benefit analysis of his life results in some questionable motives. He used to run. He loved running for the high of it, the release, and for the end where he stopped and said to himself (and sometimes to Wilson) that he just ran ten miles, twenty, a marathon. Each step became torture at those distances. But each step brought him closer to the end. And now instead of a leisurely walk, his life has become the ultimate endurance race, with each day spent convincing himself that the end is up there somewhere. He finished a few marathons in his day. He was able to push himself that far. But a marathon has a set limit on distance and life, apparently, has none that's measurable. So he takes more pills and more chances and sees just how far he can go.
When he first comes back to work, he finds himself much more reluctant, much more argumentative when it comes to patients' wishes. Every death becomes a cop-out on life. Every plea for a treatment to stop, a life-ending bolus, is a runner claiming a cramp and bailing out at the next stop for water. Those people think they want to die, but a good majority have other options that they're too tired or scared to try. They're bowing out early because they think they've lost already. They want to know what’s next and expect that their religious beliefs will be upheld at the moment of truth and absolve them of all suffering. The reprieve from the pain, House knows, is a brain on its deathbed. Once its over, there's nothing else. House doesn’t want to not exist. Why would anyone want to not exist? Besides House holds an equal part of the equation that is disease and treatment and life or death. He doesn't lose easily.
Some people claim that it’s their friends and families that keep them alive- keep them in the mindset to brave their own misery. The old woman dies, followed a week later by the husband. Articles are published claiming the power of having friends and family versus the loner who has no one. For House, it isn’t solitude or the lack of it, but the questions about people that drive him. Everyday questions: life, some rare disease, or a friend’s reaction to bad news. They’re interesting- worth knowing because they both generate and satisfy curiosity. But death, too, is a curiosity. And the desire to die conflicts with base human instinct, and so thus is mysterious. He wants to figure it out, but it’s a rare chance to die and to continue living and he needs more than just the once to see it clearly enough. He spends the next few years figuring it out because he doesn't have that much to lose.
He nearly gets a second chance to meet up with death on a sunny Tuesday morning when a gunman nearly misses his second shot. Instead of the euphoria of the endorphin rush, House ends up with a shoddy hallucination about the nature of life and his inability to live it. The hallucination, he concedes, does give him a glimmer of hope in regards to his living life. It makes him think that there is a cure out there- somewhere- even if he has to risk who he is to get it. He gets his cure for all of a month. On the other hand, the hallucination reinforces his lack of belief in the afterlife. No pearly gates there. Just a subconscious slew of images followed by months of tiresome recovery from recovery.
House isn’t sure what he was thinking when he took thirty oxycodone in a day, so he prefers to believe he wasn’t. Despite all the threats and the pain, he still doesn’t want to die. Not then, not ever- if he can help it. But he’s thankful Wilson never brings it up because he really doesn’t know what he would say except that he was drunk and an idiot, and that wouldn’t get far with Wilson. In the end, how much will it really matter what happens to him? Why would anyone care how or when he dies? He’d rather go on his own terms than someone else’s. He’d choose an overdose over a gnarly prison death. Not that he was trying to die.
Intentionally trying, he decides, is overrated. Electrocution is definitely a painful way to go and if he has a choice that won’t be it. It takes him a full two hours to get the nerve to put the knife into the socket. He knows it will be painful, embarrassing, potentially disabling. But it is just a shock. People shock themselves all the time. It’s a controlled experiment as long as the Bitch actually answers his page and knows how to do her job. But he still isn’t sure he’ll actually do it until he sees the swift movement of her skinny legs past the conference room door and suddenly his hand acts of its own volition. Thousands of volts surge and it feels like he’s being hit by a MAC truck in slow motion. At first, everything goes white and then just as suddenly turns to pitch black. House is nothing at all until he wakes and Wilson calls him an idiot.
He doesn’t regret the electrocution, but his preoccupation is another story. If he hadn’t been in the clinic that day, he wouldn’t have been distracted by the prospect of intentional re-creation of temporary death. If he hadn’t been distracted, he could’ve prevented another man’s premature death. But the issue was, in some way, important enough for him to shirk his responsibilities and he can’t help but feel just a little guilty. It wasn’t totally Thirteen’s fault. It was his fault, too.
Three days later, he’s tentatively rubbing ointment on the burn on his hand when he comes to the conclusion that it isn’t death he wants to know about- it’s something else that he can’t quite pinpoint. He wants something to change, for something to happen. But this, he’s learned, can be overcome with a myriad of pleasures- drugs, sex, rock ‘n’ roll. He'd learned that two days after leaving for Johns Hopkins. House supposes that he’s outgrown them, gotten bored with them. He needs something new. Something different. Something real. Maybe he’s run out. At forty-eight and crippled, he’s done everything he can. And it’s not like he can gear up and get the death defying rush from climbing Mt. Everest or base-jumping off the Grand Canyon.
Wilson is mostly wrong. House doesn’t take the supposedly tainted blood because he just feels like risking his life that day. He takes it because he knows that he’s right and that nothing will happen. The moment Thirteen tells him he’s sweating, however, a chill runs up his spine that’s not caused by the fever alone. The thought of bleeding out from every organ, of being fatally ill without a cause or cure in sight is enough to make him just a bit nauseous. To allay his fear, he unhooks himself from the blood pressure monitor and the needles and begins a quick walk back to his office, Thirteen rushing behind him, telling him he should be admitted, telling him that something’s obviously wrong and that they should test him. He hears bits and pieces, but it isn’t until he gets to his office door that he figures it out. House doesn’t feel sick- just cold. If he had known his body was going to react to the blood, he would’ve spared himself the humiliation of being dosed and poked by his own team. He had more of a chance of dying from their antics than dying from tainted blood. And that wasn't his fault.
After the bus accident, House takes his final chance. He goes full bore for something that he shouldn’t and he nearly does himself in for good. First it's because he needs to know. And then it's because Wilson needs it more. At first, the brain surgery is just another creative solution to an unsolvable case. When it becomes necessary, he knows, somehow, that he won't come through unscathed. The inevitability of permanent death or disability terrifies him, but he can't resist the opportunity to make things right because he knows that if he doesn't, everything will be wrong. Afterwards, through the disorientation, the seizures, the headaches and dizziness that befall him for weeks afterwards, he becomes desperate for a lifeline, for solid ground. He awakes each morning with a headache and hopes that the day will be another day free of seizures. His thoughts become jumbled and incomplete, his hearing a little less accurate. He sleeps twelve, thirteen hours, but it never seems to be enough. Through the infarction and the break up with Stacy, through the shooting, through every other time he's fallen, it's always been Wilson: Wilson helping him around his apartment, cooking dinner, cleaning up, driving him to rehab. This time, Wilson disappears and House flails in unforgiving turbulance. After he has a seizure at his apartment and misses two appointments, Cuddy starts sending someone by and then ends up there herself. She tells him that Wilson's taking some leave, to give him some time. When Wilson returns to Princeton two months later, he doesn't call or visit. Instead, he moves his office to the other side of the building.
Despite all of Cuddy's reassurances and a year's supply of anticonvulsants, nothing is ever the same again. Amber's illness and death takes its toll. House has never felt so essential or so useless. He becomes even more intent on saving patients' lives, no matter the cost. But his body and his mind no longer recover the way they used to and he finds himself more and more dependent on his team and his medications. It's worse than the infarction, worse than the shooting, worse than his father's modes of punishment. He catches himself staring at blank walls, re-reading the same paragraph over and over without comprehension, stumbling over nonexistent cracks in the pavement. His mental acuity is marred and each misstep is another mark against him and the reputation he's created since the day he got into Hopkins. The micro successes in between keep him upright, but he fears the next falter will cost him everything. It escalates and forms into black fiendish harpy that waits around every corner for the next mistake. It's the kind of disquietude that makes him bury his exhausted head in pillows, only to find that sleep (like success) is elusive. He hates failure. But this singular failure is the pinnacle; this failure costs him more than any other.
House stops stealing Wilson’s lunch, mostly because they stop eating together. And Wilson stops nagging him about the pills because they rarely talk anyway. They pass each other in the halls sometimes and each looks for the first opportunity to be otherwise occupied. When a consult is required, it's done in the formal way that House always resented and he has to wait in line just like everyone else. House feels guilty enough, but there's a complicated reprieve in that Wilson almost killed him. Requests for consults from Wilson always go at the bottom of his list. Wilson had stacked six months of dating a girl against a twenty year friendship. Cuddy becomes an empathetic confidant and keeps telling him that maybe it'll work out and says that it isn't really his fault that Amber died. She, too, points a finger at Wilson, but forgives him all the same. House would, too. If Wilson would allow it.
Years pass, fellows come and go. Eventually, House and Wilson can face each other in the hallway. At first, it's murmured hellos sneaking past tight lips. Then it's bump up on the list of consults and a tentative knock on the door. Midmorning of an overcast November day brings House into work early and the case necessitates an immediate oncology consult. He brings the MRI with him to the cafeteria and plops into the seat across from Wilson as if they've done this all along. He places the films on the table, says "unilateral cervical lymph node involvement," and Wilson grabs the file, says they should get a beer a little later, and they do. By that time, the incident has faded to a distant lighthouse on both of their minds, flickering in the darkness every few moments and warning all away. After that first beer, they begin have a quiet dinners (sometimes with Cuddy, sometimes not) in low key restaurants and talk about a case or the latest developments in hospital gossip, but never anything personal, and nothing about the past. There is still a void between them, something irreplacable and silent, an unspeakable horror that sometimes creeps to the edge of their conversations before silence takes over and a beer bottle is hastily brought to lips, the next sentence starting with "So..." Something has changed. The memory of death has changed their perception of life. Their blinders have been taken away and they see each other and themselves clearly for the very first time, but they don't like what they see.
House's parents die. There was that, the funerals within a year of each other. He's getting used to them now because he's getting old and everyone dies, but he still wants someone there to guide him. Cuddy goes with him to upstate New York and he tells her everything. That becomes the final turning point for them, that night at his parents' house after they are both gone. He's drunk, she's not, but it works. And they keep doing it this time because he can't pull away from her and she doesn't see any reason why he should. House vaguely wonders if Cuddy gave Wilson the same treatment when his parents went. House is pretty sure he remembers that Wilson's parents died too, but his memory is a little screwy now and besides, he isn't paying that much attention to Wilson's personal life anymore. He gets his confirmation later, when they don't show up. He is sure that they would've been there if they were still alive. And he's sure he wouldn't be put in this position because they would've taken care of it. Wilson's treatment is none of his business.
An oncologist dying of cancer is just too cliché and House never even thinks to tease Wilson about it. Wilson is 48. House can’t believe he is going to outlive the guy he used to call his best friend. Pancreatic cancer hits quick and hard and there is almost nothing anyone can do about it. After three months of treatment, the tumors are still growing and Wilson, in between bouts of consciousness, begs House to do what he himself cannot. One injection. One overdose. Complete relief. There isn't going to be a cure.
House isn’t sure what day it is. He is unchanged, unclean, ignorant of the silent watch of nurses and doctors and Cuddy’s hand squeezing the space between his shoulder blades. There is only Wilson’s gray and emaciated face, his head with the wispy baldness of radiation and chemo, his eyes so recessed and his mouth in a tight line despite the I.V. in his hand. There is the steady silent drip of clear fluid into a shrunken vein. There is something like a vague hint of shit and urine and something rotting underneath the antiseptic. But all covered with aerosol and air conditioning and the aroma of the hospital crafted lasagna that sits untouched on the stand. House can’t bear the thought of stealing this meal.
A hand is on his and he knows, now, that Wilson is awake again. The first time in hours. Or maybe days. He isn’t at all sure. His grip, though weakened, is still painful. His nails, yellow and brittle, bite into House’s palm, marking him.
“Do it. Please.” It’s barely a whisper, tight and controlled and followed by a swallow and shutting of the eyes.
House’s head shakes of its own volition. He looks towards the linoleum under his feet. Pale and reflective of the fluorescent light above him. “I can’t.”
“Get someone.”
“I can’t.”
He allows himself a half second. Just a moment. To look his old friend in the eye, to see the hurt and regret and years lost. House turns his face towards the edge of the bed and the ruffled blue sheets. Pain is an old bedfellow and it shouldn't be Wilson's at all. Not for a long long time. There is some joke somewhere, something to take the edge off, but he can’t think of it. Maybe it's the old brain injury, his attention problem. Maybe not. Wilson grips his hand even harder and groans. The cancer is eating him from the inside out. He’ll be septic soon.
“Wilson…”
“Please…”
“I’m sorry.”
Their eyes meet for another moment and he is nearly swallowed whole. His lip quivers, his hand shakes. This shouldn’t be happening.
“Please…”
“I’m so sorry….”
Wilson nods. As if he understands this. But he can’t. Not really. It is not his to understand.
“I didn't know what I was thinking. You always....” He trails off and then continues. "She was happy. I thought you'd rather save her than..." This is not what he expected or wanted to hear. Years wasted because of this nameless guilt. He lets his hand drop from Wilson’s and it goes instead cover his eyes and the sudden moisture beading there. He swallows against the lump forming in his throat. “Just this once, House… I swear. Just...”
“I never hated you for it. I thought you were angry..." He swipes his palm across his head, feels the old scars there, underneath the thin gray hair. "Wilson..."
“No. Just…” He struggles for a moment, groans again, reaches on the sheets for something to hold. House finds him again, grips hard. “Hurts, you know?”
“Yeah.” He isn't sure if they're talking about Amber or the brain surgery or the cancer.
“Why not then?”
House doesn't know. He wants to be able to say that this will come to pass, but it hasn't passed in a long time. Maybe tomorrow, this cancer will be in remission, Wilson's insides won’t be rotting away, dying. Logically, it’s impossible. This is death. They both know it. He cannot bear the thought of speeding up the process, if only to deny Wilson these hours of pain. There is always something else to say. Something else he has to tell him, or bounce off of him. This friendship can’t be over yet, but it's been over for years. House brings a hand to his eyes again and it comes away wet. “I can’t.”
“Okay.”
Two more days pass and House isn’t sure anymore what is dream or reality because his mind is too tired to care. He dreams about lying on the couch in his apartment with Stacy pinching his arm and dialing 911. He imagines himself on the floor of his office, bleeding out and hopes that he's hallucinating this future. He dreams about the bus and the look on Amber's face when he'd seen the truck moments from hitting them. Cuddy tells him to get some real sleep, but he can't leave because he thinks that maybe today is the last day he'll talk to Wilson.
They talk about everything when Wilson’s awake. They talk about co-workers and employees, about the transvestite hooker incident from 1995, the two week girlfriend that broke up Wilson's first marriage, and the way that the hot CNA on this wing gives sponge baths that make Wilson wish he was twenty again. They laugh a little and House cracks jokes that he didn't think he'd say again. They talk about meeting and talk about Cuddy and the kid, Maya, she's adopted from Ecuador. They talk about patients and symptoms and disease and House feels focused for the first time in years. Wilson talks about his school, his family, his brother and House listens for once, thinking about his dad. He’s running out of time, he knows, but he won’t burden Wilson with his own pathetic excuses, so he just says that he's sorry. He's sorry for everything and hopes that it's enough. Wilson is dying. He slips into a delirium and then a coma and House sits silent in a chair beside his bed. There is nothing more said between the two of them. Nothing more to be done. Later, House unhooks the heart monitor and everything but the Dilaudid.
He thought he couldn’t do it. But now. Now there is no more Wilson. Just a body. A breathing body with a heartbeat and breath and deteriorating brain waves: nothing more. He pulls the syringe from his personal stash, the one he keeps for emergencies, and late at night, far from the prying eyes of nurses, he does it. Silent and quick. A needle finds its way into the vein. There’s so many pricks there that no one will notice an extra.
Wilson’s breathing slows, rattles, and House grips his live hand one last time. He imagines that it grips back and that Wilson tells him its okay. Reality doesn't work that way.
“See ya buddy.”
And he’s gone.
Afterwards, House goes home, takes a shower, wraps himself around Cuddy and the five year old that mistakenly calls him "Papa." Cuddy grabs onto him and asks about it, but he can't talk about that just yet so they sleep. In the morning, there's work. There's arrangements to be made, an apartment to clean out. Wilson's brother, Brian, arrives late in the afternoon and they continue their work until the sun has long since dropped behind the trees and mosquitoes swarm near the light on the porch. House spends most of the time watching, staring blankly into the distance as Cuddy and Brian do the work. Cuddy grabs his hand a few times, gives him a reassuring squeeze, and doesn't ask the question on her mind because she already sees the answer in his face.
Two days later, the funeral is a quiet collection of colleagues and people that House hasn't seen or heard from in years. Some of them are relatives of Wilson's that House never met. Some of the mourners are old friends from old times. Stacy even makes an appearance, if only to squeeze a few tears out and offer a hesitant hug before Mark pulls her her away. Then there's Wilson's ex-wives keeping their distance from House and each other. Almost all of Wilson's employees make it. There's some that haven't worked in Princeton for ten years but they make the journey anyway. Most of the shoulder patting and consolation go to Brian and to an uncle that House has never even heard of, but Cuddy's got her arm looped through his, hanging tight to his forearm, grounding him in a situation otherwise beyond gravity's pull. If not for her, he thinks, some unspeakable force would loop it's hold around him and toss him eons away to a place without time and consequence. But maybe it would be better there.
"He regretted it," House says to Cuddy when she hands him a cup of decaf on the couch in their living room. The lights are low, Maya is asleep in her own bed tonight, and Cuddy is already in her nightgown, though he's still in his slacks and a white dress shirt unbuttoned to his navel and loose in the cuffs. She curls next to him with her tea and they stare at their reflection in the blackened television screen.
"He should."
"He knew me that well. He thought he did. I thought I wanted it." He rubs his thigh for a moment and thinks he should double up on the pills tonight. It's been a long day.
"Things were crazy back then." She moves a hand to his arm again and he sips at the coffee, warm and lush over his tongue and teeth, down his throat. He's still crazy, but somehow subdued. A lot of people chalk it up to the injury. Maybe Wilson did too.
"Why didn't we talk?"
Cuddy shifts, frowns, and shrugs. "You don't like to talk." She sips her tea again. He smells something vanilla. Or maybe it's the lotion she's wearing. It's hard for him to say. "He was always the one making you talk."
"I missed him." He pauses, sighs. "I miss him."
She raises a hand to his chest and rubs above his heart in slow circles. "We've still got him."
He shakes his hand, looks up to the ceiling. "I wish he'd known."
Her head falls to his shoulder and he lifts a bit to accommodate her, throws his left leg over her right. "He knows."
Author: nomad1328
Rating: T
Words: 6000ish
Warnings: Spoilers through the end of Season 4 and Major Character Death
Summary: He hates failure. But this failure is the pinnacle; this failure costs him more than any other.
Disclaimer: House is property of all those people in LA. Just borrowing for a bit and not making any $$ whatsoever off of this.
A/N: This fic (most of it) has been sitting around for almost a year. After the finale, I decided it was a goner. But then it turned into a post-finale fic. Thanks go to
joe_pike_junior for bowing to my whims and offering up beta skills.
Someday my pain, someday my pain
Will mark you
Harness your blame, harness your blame
And walk through
With the wild wolves around you
In the morning, I'll call you
Send it farther on
-The Wolves (Act I and II), Bon Iver
Death is one of a hundred certainties in life, but only spoken of indirectly, or in the quiet dark privacy of home. Always present in the deepest darkest fears, from the rise of childhood consciousness to middle age, to the elder years, the inevitable consequence of conception is nothing tangible or real for the majority. Poets lament, lovers anguish over the possibility, but the average worker bee moves forward, selectively ignorant of their own impending doom. Only the practical plan for death after the day is done, in closed, windowless offices with mahogany and lawyers and gold lettered pens. Afterall, no one actually thinks they're going to live forever. No one wants to do that. Eventually, after the glory of twenty plus years, gold watches, retirement parties, RV trips, there will be an incident, a disease, a downfall that provides a careful reminder that it's coming. After the prime of life comes the pain, the suffering, the incessant devastating loss of everything gained. From the first cry, that remarkable step, a babble to a sentence, college, family, Happily Ever After and ‘Til Death Do Us Part, and all the suffering and monotony and the occasional blips of earth-shattering joy that goes with it. There are gray hairs, arthritic joints, disease, funeral after funeral, loneliness, dementia, death. He knows it comes. It’s never pleasant. Never the release everyone thinks it will be. There is always something unfinished. If there is a goal besides the attainment of knowledge, it is the prevention of this end for as long as possible.
House is ten when he attends his first funeral. His aunt Martha. Maybe a great aunt. He doesn't remember. He does, however, remember grabbing his mother's sleeve when she put a hand to her mouth near the telephone receiver. Her eyes glassy, but not quite spilling, she takes his hand, squeezes, tells him that Martha is in heaven now. He isn't even sure who Martha is, but he's smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Two days later, they pile into his Dad's Plymouth at four in the morning and drive six hours to New York. He has to wear a suit at the church and despite his dad's protests, his mom lets him keep his pyjamas on and then change in the car when they get there. The drive is long and he sleeps most of it, but he's still tired when they arrive and he doesn't want to go inside. His youthful curiosity, however, gets the best of him. He peers over the edge of the coffin, wondering if he should touch her face. Plastic. It looks plastic, fake. Too red lipstick, rouged cheeks, white face. And he wonders if they didn’t make a model of Aunt Martha so that people could see what she looked like when she was alive. That maybe she's already decaying- putrid black and green and maggots from her nose. Like that dead rabbit he’d found on the side of the road. He asks his older cousin, Jacob. Jacob hits him hard on the arm, says “Shut up, Greg” and goes on crying with his hands in fists on his knees. House rubs his arm and continues watching the spectacle.
Over the course of his childhood, his aspirations change by the hour. A pilot at noon, an archaeologist by three, a truck driver at dinner. At fifteen, he decides once and for all that he's going to be a doctor. It's an early age and his teachers nod and shake their heads and one says "That's good, Greg. But you know that's an awful lot of school, right?" At fifteen, he's not doing great in the public schools his parents send him to. He bounces from military base schools to local schools, but can't find a niche. His teachers label him with some type of learning disorder and give him the lower level texts and classes where he's bored in seconds. He never studies from those books. He has his own, rented from libraries or bought at the thrift store with his allowance. He sleeps through class and reads all night with a flashlight under the covers. After he declares his future profession, he gets an after school job as a nurse’s assistant at the base hospital, with the help from his science teacher. She figures it's the least she can do to help the boy. The sooner he realizes it, the better. It's a dirty job that House hates, but he learns a lot and he sees a lot more death along the way. Babies suffocating in their sleep for no reason, teenage car crash victims, middle-aged cancer deaths, and the strokes and heart attacks of the elder years. All different ages, all different ways. Some die screaming. Others sigh and clench. There are lonely quiet deaths, deaths in rooms of crowded people with teary faces, deaths with a preacher holding a hand. It always sucks. Always. No one wants to live forever. But no one wants to die either. He works there until he aces his admittance exams to Johns Hopkins pre-med program and gains a lofty scholarship to go with it, astounding his parents and teachers alike. They didn't even know he was taking them.
His college and med school years are a blur of existence and estrangement from everything he has known before. There is knowledge and class and books and drugs and sex and life has never seemed so worth living. Death is employment for him, but the strangers he treats never remind him of his own mortality until it hits a little closer. Geri Weathers says she doesn't want to die. House isn’t yet as cynical as he will become, but he figures her for a brave little liar. She's twenty-eight, hardly ready- but no one is ever ready for this. Once he figures out the cause, Geri only has a week maybe, two if she's lucky and can win a battle against the pain. By the end of the third day, House is prescribing enough pain medication to knock out an elephant, but Geri keeps up her façade. In between bouts of sleep pushed by the Fentanyl patches and steady flow of morphine, she walks the halls with her husband. One step at a time. If it was him, he decides, he'd end it sooner rather than allow it to come later.
House was a year ahead of Mark Weathers in med school. And Mark never gives up on anything, but he gives up on Geri pretty quickly- even if he doesn’t say so. When Mark first comes to him, House isn't even sure Geri is really sick. He learns soon enough. Within a week, she's admitted to the hospital where they all work and she has a death sentence hanging over her head. Mark shows up everyday, kisses his wife, sleeps in a bed wheeled into the room on the days when he doesn’t work. On the seventh day, he pulls his old mentor aside and says he can't take it. He'd come to House before, back in the first weeks of school and said the same thing about Dr. Olafson's demanding course in Molecules and Cells. That class, Friday nights at the Brass Monkey, and Geri's friend Vanessa taught House that Mark never knows exactly what he wants. Pain dictates otherwise. Mark knows now. He wants House to do something. He says Geri wants it too. She is in so much pain. House is thirty years old. On the chart, it looks like a normal dose.
Society has overcome its reluctance to talk about sex, drugs, and psychiatric illness, but death is still taboo. No one dares utter the word: “She’s dying.” The phrase turns into something like: “She won’t be with us much longer.” As if she would be with someone else instead. There are quiet prayers in quiet sanctuaries, potluck dinners to help in times of need, preoccupations for the children who just can't understand and the adults who prefer not to. Practitioners avoid muttering the word altogether and tell us what procedures they can avoid, what can be done- but never offer how long she’ll be in that bed because she’s not getting out of it. House finds himself bowing to the whims of the dying because he can't stand not to. It's their choice. Patients come to doctors when they want help. When they grow tired of help, they should have the right to end their suffering sooner rather than later. Part of his job is to ease the suffering, so he does it and after a while, the guilt turns to duty.
He doesn’t attend another funeral until he’s almost forty and Stacy’s mother dies unexpectedly on a frozen mid January day. It comes as something of a surprise, though she wasn't young and wasn't in the best of health. House dreads the whole process. All the useless mumbo jumbo that goes with being dead. He knows it happens because everyone else has talked about it. It isn’t that no one has died, it’s just that House is a busy man. He works. Death is a right of passage for the person that dies and everyone who needs that closure. House's closure comes at every living moment. He doesn't need it after death. This time, however, House does his duty and holds Stacy, buries her face into his chest, and lets her cry. He doesn't need to say anything. But the funeral is another matter. He almost resists going completely, but Stacy needs him there. He keeps his mouth shut, but his mind won’t stop. Stacy handles well-meaning sympathizers, smiling with red eyes and tearstains, hands gripping onto other hands. House stands by and listens. It was a beautiful service, what she wanted, she’s looking down on all of us now. Your mom was a wonderful person. It was a normal service. She practically had the whole thing planned in her will. She doesn’t exist anymore- just a rotting corpse. And Naomi Price wasn’t that great of a person. Annoying and self-righteous, in fact, and she'd never approved of House. Didn't even pretend. None of it is about closure or celebration of a life completed or even putting the dead to rest. It’s a gathering of people who would feel guilty if they weren’t there because someone told them long ago that it was appropriate and good. On the drive home, House tells Stacy that he doesn’t want a funeral at all. He just wants a huge mural of his face painted on the exterior of the hospital. Stacy doesn’t have to tell him to shut up.
Just six months later, his face (along with an artistic rendition of his mangled thigh) is plastered on a few articles detailing a gross medical error that nearly cost him his life. He’s in so much pain that the moment his heart stops is an absolute reprieve and he dreams his life as it could be- a healthy life where doctors don't make mistakes, diseases never outpace doctors' methods, and his leg doesn't hurt- but none of them come to fruition. It isn’t a vision. Three weeks later, he's lying nearly immobile on the couch and he realizes that the cost benefit analysis of his life results in some questionable motives. He used to run. He loved running for the high of it, the release, and for the end where he stopped and said to himself (and sometimes to Wilson) that he just ran ten miles, twenty, a marathon. Each step became torture at those distances. But each step brought him closer to the end. And now instead of a leisurely walk, his life has become the ultimate endurance race, with each day spent convincing himself that the end is up there somewhere. He finished a few marathons in his day. He was able to push himself that far. But a marathon has a set limit on distance and life, apparently, has none that's measurable. So he takes more pills and more chances and sees just how far he can go.
When he first comes back to work, he finds himself much more reluctant, much more argumentative when it comes to patients' wishes. Every death becomes a cop-out on life. Every plea for a treatment to stop, a life-ending bolus, is a runner claiming a cramp and bailing out at the next stop for water. Those people think they want to die, but a good majority have other options that they're too tired or scared to try. They're bowing out early because they think they've lost already. They want to know what’s next and expect that their religious beliefs will be upheld at the moment of truth and absolve them of all suffering. The reprieve from the pain, House knows, is a brain on its deathbed. Once its over, there's nothing else. House doesn’t want to not exist. Why would anyone want to not exist? Besides House holds an equal part of the equation that is disease and treatment and life or death. He doesn't lose easily.
Some people claim that it’s their friends and families that keep them alive- keep them in the mindset to brave their own misery. The old woman dies, followed a week later by the husband. Articles are published claiming the power of having friends and family versus the loner who has no one. For House, it isn’t solitude or the lack of it, but the questions about people that drive him. Everyday questions: life, some rare disease, or a friend’s reaction to bad news. They’re interesting- worth knowing because they both generate and satisfy curiosity. But death, too, is a curiosity. And the desire to die conflicts with base human instinct, and so thus is mysterious. He wants to figure it out, but it’s a rare chance to die and to continue living and he needs more than just the once to see it clearly enough. He spends the next few years figuring it out because he doesn't have that much to lose.
He nearly gets a second chance to meet up with death on a sunny Tuesday morning when a gunman nearly misses his second shot. Instead of the euphoria of the endorphin rush, House ends up with a shoddy hallucination about the nature of life and his inability to live it. The hallucination, he concedes, does give him a glimmer of hope in regards to his living life. It makes him think that there is a cure out there- somewhere- even if he has to risk who he is to get it. He gets his cure for all of a month. On the other hand, the hallucination reinforces his lack of belief in the afterlife. No pearly gates there. Just a subconscious slew of images followed by months of tiresome recovery from recovery.
House isn’t sure what he was thinking when he took thirty oxycodone in a day, so he prefers to believe he wasn’t. Despite all the threats and the pain, he still doesn’t want to die. Not then, not ever- if he can help it. But he’s thankful Wilson never brings it up because he really doesn’t know what he would say except that he was drunk and an idiot, and that wouldn’t get far with Wilson. In the end, how much will it really matter what happens to him? Why would anyone care how or when he dies? He’d rather go on his own terms than someone else’s. He’d choose an overdose over a gnarly prison death. Not that he was trying to die.
Intentionally trying, he decides, is overrated. Electrocution is definitely a painful way to go and if he has a choice that won’t be it. It takes him a full two hours to get the nerve to put the knife into the socket. He knows it will be painful, embarrassing, potentially disabling. But it is just a shock. People shock themselves all the time. It’s a controlled experiment as long as the Bitch actually answers his page and knows how to do her job. But he still isn’t sure he’ll actually do it until he sees the swift movement of her skinny legs past the conference room door and suddenly his hand acts of its own volition. Thousands of volts surge and it feels like he’s being hit by a MAC truck in slow motion. At first, everything goes white and then just as suddenly turns to pitch black. House is nothing at all until he wakes and Wilson calls him an idiot.
He doesn’t regret the electrocution, but his preoccupation is another story. If he hadn’t been in the clinic that day, he wouldn’t have been distracted by the prospect of intentional re-creation of temporary death. If he hadn’t been distracted, he could’ve prevented another man’s premature death. But the issue was, in some way, important enough for him to shirk his responsibilities and he can’t help but feel just a little guilty. It wasn’t totally Thirteen’s fault. It was his fault, too.
Three days later, he’s tentatively rubbing ointment on the burn on his hand when he comes to the conclusion that it isn’t death he wants to know about- it’s something else that he can’t quite pinpoint. He wants something to change, for something to happen. But this, he’s learned, can be overcome with a myriad of pleasures- drugs, sex, rock ‘n’ roll. He'd learned that two days after leaving for Johns Hopkins. House supposes that he’s outgrown them, gotten bored with them. He needs something new. Something different. Something real. Maybe he’s run out. At forty-eight and crippled, he’s done everything he can. And it’s not like he can gear up and get the death defying rush from climbing Mt. Everest or base-jumping off the Grand Canyon.
Wilson is mostly wrong. House doesn’t take the supposedly tainted blood because he just feels like risking his life that day. He takes it because he knows that he’s right and that nothing will happen. The moment Thirteen tells him he’s sweating, however, a chill runs up his spine that’s not caused by the fever alone. The thought of bleeding out from every organ, of being fatally ill without a cause or cure in sight is enough to make him just a bit nauseous. To allay his fear, he unhooks himself from the blood pressure monitor and the needles and begins a quick walk back to his office, Thirteen rushing behind him, telling him he should be admitted, telling him that something’s obviously wrong and that they should test him. He hears bits and pieces, but it isn’t until he gets to his office door that he figures it out. House doesn’t feel sick- just cold. If he had known his body was going to react to the blood, he would’ve spared himself the humiliation of being dosed and poked by his own team. He had more of a chance of dying from their antics than dying from tainted blood. And that wasn't his fault.
After the bus accident, House takes his final chance. He goes full bore for something that he shouldn’t and he nearly does himself in for good. First it's because he needs to know. And then it's because Wilson needs it more. At first, the brain surgery is just another creative solution to an unsolvable case. When it becomes necessary, he knows, somehow, that he won't come through unscathed. The inevitability of permanent death or disability terrifies him, but he can't resist the opportunity to make things right because he knows that if he doesn't, everything will be wrong. Afterwards, through the disorientation, the seizures, the headaches and dizziness that befall him for weeks afterwards, he becomes desperate for a lifeline, for solid ground. He awakes each morning with a headache and hopes that the day will be another day free of seizures. His thoughts become jumbled and incomplete, his hearing a little less accurate. He sleeps twelve, thirteen hours, but it never seems to be enough. Through the infarction and the break up with Stacy, through the shooting, through every other time he's fallen, it's always been Wilson: Wilson helping him around his apartment, cooking dinner, cleaning up, driving him to rehab. This time, Wilson disappears and House flails in unforgiving turbulance. After he has a seizure at his apartment and misses two appointments, Cuddy starts sending someone by and then ends up there herself. She tells him that Wilson's taking some leave, to give him some time. When Wilson returns to Princeton two months later, he doesn't call or visit. Instead, he moves his office to the other side of the building.
Despite all of Cuddy's reassurances and a year's supply of anticonvulsants, nothing is ever the same again. Amber's illness and death takes its toll. House has never felt so essential or so useless. He becomes even more intent on saving patients' lives, no matter the cost. But his body and his mind no longer recover the way they used to and he finds himself more and more dependent on his team and his medications. It's worse than the infarction, worse than the shooting, worse than his father's modes of punishment. He catches himself staring at blank walls, re-reading the same paragraph over and over without comprehension, stumbling over nonexistent cracks in the pavement. His mental acuity is marred and each misstep is another mark against him and the reputation he's created since the day he got into Hopkins. The micro successes in between keep him upright, but he fears the next falter will cost him everything. It escalates and forms into black fiendish harpy that waits around every corner for the next mistake. It's the kind of disquietude that makes him bury his exhausted head in pillows, only to find that sleep (like success) is elusive. He hates failure. But this singular failure is the pinnacle; this failure costs him more than any other.
House stops stealing Wilson’s lunch, mostly because they stop eating together. And Wilson stops nagging him about the pills because they rarely talk anyway. They pass each other in the halls sometimes and each looks for the first opportunity to be otherwise occupied. When a consult is required, it's done in the formal way that House always resented and he has to wait in line just like everyone else. House feels guilty enough, but there's a complicated reprieve in that Wilson almost killed him. Requests for consults from Wilson always go at the bottom of his list. Wilson had stacked six months of dating a girl against a twenty year friendship. Cuddy becomes an empathetic confidant and keeps telling him that maybe it'll work out and says that it isn't really his fault that Amber died. She, too, points a finger at Wilson, but forgives him all the same. House would, too. If Wilson would allow it.
Years pass, fellows come and go. Eventually, House and Wilson can face each other in the hallway. At first, it's murmured hellos sneaking past tight lips. Then it's bump up on the list of consults and a tentative knock on the door. Midmorning of an overcast November day brings House into work early and the case necessitates an immediate oncology consult. He brings the MRI with him to the cafeteria and plops into the seat across from Wilson as if they've done this all along. He places the films on the table, says "unilateral cervical lymph node involvement," and Wilson grabs the file, says they should get a beer a little later, and they do. By that time, the incident has faded to a distant lighthouse on both of their minds, flickering in the darkness every few moments and warning all away. After that first beer, they begin have a quiet dinners (sometimes with Cuddy, sometimes not) in low key restaurants and talk about a case or the latest developments in hospital gossip, but never anything personal, and nothing about the past. There is still a void between them, something irreplacable and silent, an unspeakable horror that sometimes creeps to the edge of their conversations before silence takes over and a beer bottle is hastily brought to lips, the next sentence starting with "So..." Something has changed. The memory of death has changed their perception of life. Their blinders have been taken away and they see each other and themselves clearly for the very first time, but they don't like what they see.
House's parents die. There was that, the funerals within a year of each other. He's getting used to them now because he's getting old and everyone dies, but he still wants someone there to guide him. Cuddy goes with him to upstate New York and he tells her everything. That becomes the final turning point for them, that night at his parents' house after they are both gone. He's drunk, she's not, but it works. And they keep doing it this time because he can't pull away from her and she doesn't see any reason why he should. House vaguely wonders if Cuddy gave Wilson the same treatment when his parents went. House is pretty sure he remembers that Wilson's parents died too, but his memory is a little screwy now and besides, he isn't paying that much attention to Wilson's personal life anymore. He gets his confirmation later, when they don't show up. He is sure that they would've been there if they were still alive. And he's sure he wouldn't be put in this position because they would've taken care of it. Wilson's treatment is none of his business.
An oncologist dying of cancer is just too cliché and House never even thinks to tease Wilson about it. Wilson is 48. House can’t believe he is going to outlive the guy he used to call his best friend. Pancreatic cancer hits quick and hard and there is almost nothing anyone can do about it. After three months of treatment, the tumors are still growing and Wilson, in between bouts of consciousness, begs House to do what he himself cannot. One injection. One overdose. Complete relief. There isn't going to be a cure.
House isn’t sure what day it is. He is unchanged, unclean, ignorant of the silent watch of nurses and doctors and Cuddy’s hand squeezing the space between his shoulder blades. There is only Wilson’s gray and emaciated face, his head with the wispy baldness of radiation and chemo, his eyes so recessed and his mouth in a tight line despite the I.V. in his hand. There is the steady silent drip of clear fluid into a shrunken vein. There is something like a vague hint of shit and urine and something rotting underneath the antiseptic. But all covered with aerosol and air conditioning and the aroma of the hospital crafted lasagna that sits untouched on the stand. House can’t bear the thought of stealing this meal.
A hand is on his and he knows, now, that Wilson is awake again. The first time in hours. Or maybe days. He isn’t at all sure. His grip, though weakened, is still painful. His nails, yellow and brittle, bite into House’s palm, marking him.
“Do it. Please.” It’s barely a whisper, tight and controlled and followed by a swallow and shutting of the eyes.
House’s head shakes of its own volition. He looks towards the linoleum under his feet. Pale and reflective of the fluorescent light above him. “I can’t.”
“Get someone.”
“I can’t.”
He allows himself a half second. Just a moment. To look his old friend in the eye, to see the hurt and regret and years lost. House turns his face towards the edge of the bed and the ruffled blue sheets. Pain is an old bedfellow and it shouldn't be Wilson's at all. Not for a long long time. There is some joke somewhere, something to take the edge off, but he can’t think of it. Maybe it's the old brain injury, his attention problem. Maybe not. Wilson grips his hand even harder and groans. The cancer is eating him from the inside out. He’ll be septic soon.
“Wilson…”
“Please…”
“I’m sorry.”
Their eyes meet for another moment and he is nearly swallowed whole. His lip quivers, his hand shakes. This shouldn’t be happening.
“Please…”
“I’m so sorry….”
Wilson nods. As if he understands this. But he can’t. Not really. It is not his to understand.
“I didn't know what I was thinking. You always....” He trails off and then continues. "She was happy. I thought you'd rather save her than..." This is not what he expected or wanted to hear. Years wasted because of this nameless guilt. He lets his hand drop from Wilson’s and it goes instead cover his eyes and the sudden moisture beading there. He swallows against the lump forming in his throat. “Just this once, House… I swear. Just...”
“I never hated you for it. I thought you were angry..." He swipes his palm across his head, feels the old scars there, underneath the thin gray hair. "Wilson..."
“No. Just…” He struggles for a moment, groans again, reaches on the sheets for something to hold. House finds him again, grips hard. “Hurts, you know?”
“Yeah.” He isn't sure if they're talking about Amber or the brain surgery or the cancer.
“Why not then?”
House doesn't know. He wants to be able to say that this will come to pass, but it hasn't passed in a long time. Maybe tomorrow, this cancer will be in remission, Wilson's insides won’t be rotting away, dying. Logically, it’s impossible. This is death. They both know it. He cannot bear the thought of speeding up the process, if only to deny Wilson these hours of pain. There is always something else to say. Something else he has to tell him, or bounce off of him. This friendship can’t be over yet, but it's been over for years. House brings a hand to his eyes again and it comes away wet. “I can’t.”
“Okay.”
Two more days pass and House isn’t sure anymore what is dream or reality because his mind is too tired to care. He dreams about lying on the couch in his apartment with Stacy pinching his arm and dialing 911. He imagines himself on the floor of his office, bleeding out and hopes that he's hallucinating this future. He dreams about the bus and the look on Amber's face when he'd seen the truck moments from hitting them. Cuddy tells him to get some real sleep, but he can't leave because he thinks that maybe today is the last day he'll talk to Wilson.
They talk about everything when Wilson’s awake. They talk about co-workers and employees, about the transvestite hooker incident from 1995, the two week girlfriend that broke up Wilson's first marriage, and the way that the hot CNA on this wing gives sponge baths that make Wilson wish he was twenty again. They laugh a little and House cracks jokes that he didn't think he'd say again. They talk about meeting and talk about Cuddy and the kid, Maya, she's adopted from Ecuador. They talk about patients and symptoms and disease and House feels focused for the first time in years. Wilson talks about his school, his family, his brother and House listens for once, thinking about his dad. He’s running out of time, he knows, but he won’t burden Wilson with his own pathetic excuses, so he just says that he's sorry. He's sorry for everything and hopes that it's enough. Wilson is dying. He slips into a delirium and then a coma and House sits silent in a chair beside his bed. There is nothing more said between the two of them. Nothing more to be done. Later, House unhooks the heart monitor and everything but the Dilaudid.
He thought he couldn’t do it. But now. Now there is no more Wilson. Just a body. A breathing body with a heartbeat and breath and deteriorating brain waves: nothing more. He pulls the syringe from his personal stash, the one he keeps for emergencies, and late at night, far from the prying eyes of nurses, he does it. Silent and quick. A needle finds its way into the vein. There’s so many pricks there that no one will notice an extra.
Wilson’s breathing slows, rattles, and House grips his live hand one last time. He imagines that it grips back and that Wilson tells him its okay. Reality doesn't work that way.
“See ya buddy.”
And he’s gone.
Afterwards, House goes home, takes a shower, wraps himself around Cuddy and the five year old that mistakenly calls him "Papa." Cuddy grabs onto him and asks about it, but he can't talk about that just yet so they sleep. In the morning, there's work. There's arrangements to be made, an apartment to clean out. Wilson's brother, Brian, arrives late in the afternoon and they continue their work until the sun has long since dropped behind the trees and mosquitoes swarm near the light on the porch. House spends most of the time watching, staring blankly into the distance as Cuddy and Brian do the work. Cuddy grabs his hand a few times, gives him a reassuring squeeze, and doesn't ask the question on her mind because she already sees the answer in his face.
Two days later, the funeral is a quiet collection of colleagues and people that House hasn't seen or heard from in years. Some of them are relatives of Wilson's that House never met. Some of the mourners are old friends from old times. Stacy even makes an appearance, if only to squeeze a few tears out and offer a hesitant hug before Mark pulls her her away. Then there's Wilson's ex-wives keeping their distance from House and each other. Almost all of Wilson's employees make it. There's some that haven't worked in Princeton for ten years but they make the journey anyway. Most of the shoulder patting and consolation go to Brian and to an uncle that House has never even heard of, but Cuddy's got her arm looped through his, hanging tight to his forearm, grounding him in a situation otherwise beyond gravity's pull. If not for her, he thinks, some unspeakable force would loop it's hold around him and toss him eons away to a place without time and consequence. But maybe it would be better there.
"He regretted it," House says to Cuddy when she hands him a cup of decaf on the couch in their living room. The lights are low, Maya is asleep in her own bed tonight, and Cuddy is already in her nightgown, though he's still in his slacks and a white dress shirt unbuttoned to his navel and loose in the cuffs. She curls next to him with her tea and they stare at their reflection in the blackened television screen.
"He should."
"He knew me that well. He thought he did. I thought I wanted it." He rubs his thigh for a moment and thinks he should double up on the pills tonight. It's been a long day.
"Things were crazy back then." She moves a hand to his arm again and he sips at the coffee, warm and lush over his tongue and teeth, down his throat. He's still crazy, but somehow subdued. A lot of people chalk it up to the injury. Maybe Wilson did too.
"Why didn't we talk?"
Cuddy shifts, frowns, and shrugs. "You don't like to talk." She sips her tea again. He smells something vanilla. Or maybe it's the lotion she's wearing. It's hard for him to say. "He was always the one making you talk."
"I missed him." He pauses, sighs. "I miss him."
She raises a hand to his chest and rubs above his heart in slow circles. "We've still got him."
He shakes his hand, looks up to the ceiling. "I wish he'd known."
Her head falls to his shoulder and he lifts a bit to accommodate her, throws his left leg over her right. "He knows."